Hindi and Urdu are generally considered to be one spoken language with two different literary traditions. That means that Hindi and Urdu speakers who shop in the same markets have no problems understanding each other -- they'd both say yeh kitne kaa hay for 'How much is it? And the Urdu one will be یہ کتنے کا ہے؟ Hindi is written from left to right in the Devanagari script, and is the official language of India, along with English.
Urdu, on the other hand, is written from right to left in the Nastaliq script and is the national language of Pakistan. It's also one of the official languages of the Indian states of Bihar and Jammu & Kashmir. Considered as one, these tongues constitute the second most spoken language in the world, sometimes called Hindustani. In their daily lives, Hindi and Urdu speakers communicate in their 'different' languages without major problems. Both Hindi and Urdu developed from Classical Sanskrit, which appeared in the Indus Valley at about the start of the Common Era. The first old Hindi poetry was written in the year 769 AD, and by the European Middle Ages it became known as 'Hindvi'.
Muslim Turks invaded the Punjab in 1027 and took control of Delhi in 1193. They paved the way for the Islamic Mughal Empire, which ruled northern India from the 16th century until it was defeated by the British Raj in the mid-19th century. It was at this time that the language of this book began to take form, a mixture of Hindvi grammar with Arabic, Persian and Turkish vocabulary. The Muslim speakers of Hindvi began to write in the Arabic script, creating Urdu, while the Hindu population incorporated the new words but continued to write in Devanagari script.
Urdu, with more than 68 million native speakers, ranks as the eighteenth most spoken language in the world. It is the national language of Pakistan and one of the official languages of six India states. Urdu shares many linguistic features with other Indic languages that have Sanskrit as their ancestor, however, it uses Perso-Arabic script. It has a rich literature including a very popular form of love poetry called Ghazal, devotional and Sufi poetry, and is a main source to study, learn and appreciate Indo-Islamic cultural traditions.
Urdu has also been used in Indian movies since the start of the movie industry. Furthermore, Urdu skills are crucial for understanding the political, religious, and social mindset of the Urdu speaking community. Open doors to new career paths in the age of globalization–and engage with Bollywood culture on a deeper level–by studying Hindi-Urdu language and literature. Hindi is the official language of India, spoken in different regional variations in many northern Indian states, as well as throughout the South Asian diaspora of the Western world.
Urdu is the national language of Pakistan and commonly spoken in India. You will learn the similarities between Hindi and Urdu, including their shared grammar and vocabulary, even though they are written in two different scripts and have distinct literary canons. Urdu, which was often referred to by the British administrators in India as the Hindustani language, was promoted in colonial India by British policies to counter the previous emphasis on Persian. Urdu replaced Persian as the official language of India in 1837 and was made co-official, along with English. Punjabi has more than 90 million native speakers around the world and ranks as the tenth most spoken language in the world.
Punjabi is the language of sacred scriptures of the Sikhs, the official language of the state of Punjab , and a language of Sikh and Sufi mysticism and of regional literature among Punjabi Muslims in Pakistan. In Canada, Punjabi is the fourth most spoken language after English, French, and Chinese, while in the U.S. it is spoken by about half a million Punjabi and Sikh immigrants. It shares many linguistic features with other Indic languages that have Sanskrit as their common ancestor. Punjabi is taught at U-M using the Gurmukhi scrip, which has some similarities to Hindi. The Punjabi program at the University of Michigan is the oldest in the U.S. In the Delhi region of India the native language was Khariboli, whose earliest form is known as Old Hindi .
It belongs to the Western Hindi group of the Central Indo-Aryan languages. The contact of the Hindu and Muslim cultures during the period of Islamic conquests and in the Indian subcontinent led to the development of Hindustani as a product of a composite Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb. In cities such as Delhi, the Indian language Old Hindi began to acquire many Persian loanwords and continued to be called "Hindi" and later, also "Hindustani".
In southern India , a form of the language flourished in medieval India and is known as Dakhini, which contains loanwords from Telugu and Marathi. An early literary tradition of Hindavi was founded by Amir Khusrau in the late 13th century. From the 13th century until the end of the 18th century the language now known as Urdu was called Hindi, Hindavi, Hindustani, Dehlavi, Lahori, and Lashkari. The Turko-Afghan Delhi Sultanate established Persian as its official language in India, a policy continued by the Mughal Empire, which extended over most of northern South Asia from the 16th to 18th centuries and cemented Persian influence on Hindustani.
The name Urdu was first introduced by the poet Ghulam Hamadani Mushafi around 1780. While Urdu retained the grammar and core Indo-Aryan vocabulary of the local Indian dialect Khariboli, it adopted the Nastaleeq writing system – which was developed as a style of Persian calligraphy. URDU, the national language (qaumī zabān) of Pakistan and one of the fifteen officially recognized languages of India. It is spoken, according to recent censuses made in India and Pakistan, by an estimated 53 million people in the South Asian subcontinent (Schmidt, 2004, p. 288).
To this we may add the millions of people, both inside and outside the subcontinent, who use Urdu as a primary means of communication. The Panjabi-speaking population of Pakistan, for example, employ Urdu rather than their own language almost exclusively as a written and literary medium. Along with its "sister language," Hindi, with which it shares a virtually identical grammatical base, Urdu at the most basic, spoken level still functions as a convenient lingua franca, and is intelligible to vast sections of the population of South Asia. For this reason it is the preferred medium of the Indian film industry, to which many well-established Urdu writers contribute scripts and especially songs, the lyrics of which frequently follow the conventions of classical Urdu poetry. Tibetan literature has an uninterrupted history of at least 1300 years. It includes a vast corpus of indigenous works of great value for the academic study of literary genres, religious praxis, state formation, and the development of canonical systems.
Classical Tibetan is duly famous as the medium for the largest, and most accurate, body of translations of Buddhist texts from India, the majority of which are lost in the original Indian languages. In addition to being essential for the study of Tibetan history, literature, art and religion, classical Tibetan is of scholarly value for the study of South Asian culture and history, Chinese history, and historical linguistics. Modern Tibetan is spoken by a population of approximately six million, in the Tibet Autonomous Region of the China, in other Tibetan cultural regions of China, and in the Tibetan diaspora . With the recent opening of Tibet to foreign travel and research, knowledge of modern Tibetan has become essential for students of any aspect of the region.
There are numerous of modern spoken Tibetan, and the study of these dialects — essential for the study of cultural practices such as pilgrimage — is becoming an area of research at several institutions, including the University of Michigan. Sanskrit is the gateway to premodern, and especially pre-Islamic, India. It also served as a language of culture and religion and as a lingua franca in Central, East, and particularly Southeast Asia.
It was carried into those regions along with the spread of Hinduism and Buddhism. The position of Sanskrit in Asia can be likened to that of Latin in medieval and early modern Europe. Sanskrit is recognized as one of the official languages of India and every university there has a Sanskrit department. Sanskrit is of great value to the cultural self-definition of Hindu communities that have now spread across the globe.
To children of Indian cultural background, Sanskrit opens the door to their classical culture. To academic students of Sanskrit, it is a gateway to the Hindu and Buddhist traditions, and to the pre-modern history of the subcontinent and beyond. Discovery of Sanskrit by the west in 1770s led to the development of Indo-European linguistics and reconstruction of the Indo-European language family and the cultural and religious pre-histories of Europe. Thus, the historical understanding of languages such as English requires some understanding of Sanskrit. Sanskrit is also the ancestor of a number of the South Asian languages taught at the University of Michigan, including Hindi, Punjabi, and Urdu.
Bengali, with 189 million native speakers, ranks as the seventh most spoken language in the world. It is the official language of Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal. Bengali belongs to the Indo-European language family and, like many other Indian languages, has Sanskrit as its ancestor. Bengali is closely related to Hindi and Punjabi as they use the similar script, common vocabulary derived from Sanskrit, and the same word order.
Bengali has a rich literary tradition that dates back to the 12th century. The famous Bengali philosopher and poet Rabindranath Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1913. The Bengali movie industries known as Tollywood and Dhallywood are very popular because they produce good quality movies. Fresh data from the 2011 census says that Urdu is the seventh most spoken language in India. It is one of the 22 official languages recognised in the Constitution of India, having official status in Telangana, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Bengal and Delhi, while it has the status of official language of Jammu and Kashmir.
Urdu is the national language of Pakistan and is a registered regional language of Nepal. In India, although Urdu is not and never was used exclusively by Muslims , the ongoing Hindi–Urdu controversy and modern cultural association of each language with the two religions has led to fewer Hindus using Urdu. In part because the Pakistani government proclaimed Urdu the national language at Partition, the Indian state and some religious nationalists began to regard Urdu as a 'foreign' language, to be viewed with suspicion.
Urdu advocates in India disagree whether it should be allowed to write Urdu in the Devanagari and Latin script to allow its survival, or whether this will only hasten its demise and that the language can only be preserved if expressed in the Perso-Arabic script. There are 260 million speakers of Hindi, making it the fifth most spoken language in the world. Outside of India, it is spoken by a substantial population in Bangladesh, the U.K., the U.S., and thirteen other nations. It has an old and rich literature that dates back to late Medieval period. Hindi is also the main language of the Bollywood film industry, which produces an astounding number of movies on a variety of topics every year.
The Bollywood movie industry has greatly contributed to popularising Hindi around the world. Hindi is the official language of the Republic of India and the most widely spoken language in South Asia. Urdu is the national language of Pakistan, one of the official languages of India, and a tremendously important strategic language in South Asia.
With a common vocabulary and grammar, in their basic form, Hindi and Urdu are generally considered to be the same language written in two different scripts. Urdu is a member of the Indo-European family of languages; and, like most of those spoken in the northern half of the subcontinent, it belongs to the Indo-Aryan subgroup. Ultimately it is derived from Sanskrit, the classical language of India, or more accurately from its colloquial form, known as Prakrit, which is commonly referred to as "Middle Indo-Aryan" . The modern languages of north India, such as Bengali, Gujarati, and Panjabi, to which Urdu and Hindi are fairly closely related, emerged from their MIA parents around 1000 C.E., but little evidence exists for their earliest form. The diverse linguistic heritage of Nepal stems from various language groups including Tibeto-Burman, Indo-Aryan, and numerous indigenous dialects. According to the 2011 census, about 2.6% of the residents were Urdu speakers.
The official language of Nepal is Nepali, while Urdu is a registered regional dialect of Nepal. Some of the local dialects spoken in the southern Madhesh area include Urdu, Bhojpuri, Awadhi, and Maithili. Urdu is the sole national, and one of the two official languages of Pakistan . It is spoken and understood throughout the country, whereas the state-by-state languages are the provincial languages, although only 7.57% of Pakistanis speak Urdu as their first language.
Its official status has meant that Urdu is understood and spoken widely throughout Pakistan as a second or third language. It is used in education, literature, office and court business, although in practice, English is used instead of Urdu in the higher echelons of government. Article 251 of the Pakistani Constitution mandates that Urdu be implemented as the sole language of government, though English continues to be the most widely used language at the higher echelons of Pakistani government.
Confusingly, Khariboli is also used to denote the standard form of Hindi-Urdu today, as this regional dialect, once called Dehlavi and centered around the old Mughal capital of Delhi, has had great impact on the official shape of language. Hindi is one of the major languages of Uttarakhand and is spoken by the majority of the population. Hindi is the official language of the state of Uttarakhand and one of the official languages of India as recognised by the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution. It is taught in schools and is used as a medium to teach other subjects as well.
Even in the schools located in the remote areas of Uttarakhand, Hindi is the language in use. Although it isn't the mother tongue of the people living in the remote regions of Garhwal or Kumaon, it is the one they are educated in. SOON after the partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan, especially after India had taken Hindi as the official language, central leaders of Pakistan wanted Urdu to be the sole state language of entire Pakistan. This is a decision which had been strongly opposed by the people of East Pakistan. With the utmost surprise of the history of the language movement, Urdu itself has never been the most widely spoken language of Pakistan till now. During the movement, it was the language of only 7 per cent of the total population of Pakistan while Bangla accounted for 54 per cent.The mother tongue of most of the West Pakistanis were Panjabi, Pashtu, Sindhi, Balochi and so on.
Urdu is a type of Hindustani language which evolved from medieval Apabhramsa of northwest India. It's the world's twenty-first most spoken first language with over 66 million speakers. Over 75% of the words in Urdu have etymological roots in Prakrit and Sanskrit. Urdu is one of the official languages which are recognized by the Indian and Pakistani constitution.
Historically, Hindustani developed in the post-12th century period under the impact of the incoming Afghans and Turks as a linguistic modus vivendi from the sub-regional apabhramshas of north-western India. Its first major folk poet was the great Persian master, Amir Khusrau (1253–1325), who is known to have composed dohas and riddles in the newly-formed speech, then called 'Hindavi'. Through the medieval time, this mixed speech was variously called by various speech sub-groups as 'Hindavi', 'Zaban-e-Hind', 'Hindi', 'Zaban-e-Dehli', 'Rekhta', 'Gujarii.
'Dakkhani', 'Zaban-e-Urdu-e-Mualla', 'Zaban-e-Urdu', or just 'Urdu'. By the late 11th century, the name 'Hindustani' was in vogue and had become the lingua franca for most of northern India. A sub-dialect called Khari Boli was spoken in and around Delhi region at the start of 13th century when the Delhi Sultanate was established.
Khari Boli gradually became the prestige dialect of Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu) and became the basis of modern Standard Hindi & Urdu. In 1973, Urdu was recognised as the sole national language of Pakistan – although English and regional languages were also granted official recognition. Urdu as a language evolved during the last days of the Mughal rule in India.
Persian was the official language of the Mughal emperors along with Turkic and Arabic. At that time, the northern part of India was the centre of rule and knowledge, particularly Delhi and its surrounding areas, including today's Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Due to the interaction of local population and the ruling Persian-Turkic-speaking Muslim elite, a new language evolved and was known as Hindustani.
